The emergence of the Internet and the growth of business enterprises have resulted in a dramatic increase in server-centric applications. This increase has caused an equally dramatic rise in data-centric services, such as transaction processing systems, web portals, email servers, stock trading and financial transaction systems, search engines, file servers, cloud storage services, and the like. No longer just the domain of larger corporations, such data-centric services are becoming more prevalent with smaller business enterprises and institutions. These data-centric services are increasingly important in the global economy as millions (and perhaps even billions) of users rely on these services each day.
One thing that each of the above data-centric services has in common is that each typically relies heavily on storage systems for their data storage and processing requirements. Often, these storage systems are implemented as arrays of solid state drives, disk drives, tape libraries, or other storage devices. These storage systems may, in turn, be connected to networks to form storage-area-networks or network-attached storage. As data-centric services increase, reliance on storage systems of various types also increases.
Unfortunately, as reliance on storage systems continues to increase, the power consumed by the storage systems also increases. The increased power consumption can significantly increase running costs, stresses on power supplies, impacts on the environment, and device failure rates. These power costs are eventually passed on to consumers.
In today's datacenters, having a power efficient storage infrastructure becomes critical, especially when a datacenter or portions of it experience data-explosion and the amount of data that needs to be stored grows beyond the tens of petabytes threshold. The number of storage devices such as disk drives needed to provide such storage space will experience similar growth. In such situations, it is important to be able to use these storage devices as efficiently as possible and configure them to consume as little power as possible.
In view of the foregoing, what are needed are systems and methods to reduce the power consumed by storage systems. Such systems and methods will ideally be able to power down certain storage devices in a storage system to conserve power.